Why detractors can't stand Celine Dion

There's dislike, and then there's hatred, and when it comes to artists who make you want to run screaming in the other direction, Celine Dion bests most.

John Wenzel

There's dislike, and then there's hatred, and when it comes to artists who make you want to run screaming in the other direction, Celine Dion bests most.

The Canadian singer is an international star, adored by millions for her clear, muscular voice and its penchant for connecting with diverse crowds. But many also openly detest her, viewing her ubiquitous presence as a blight on the cultural skyline.

Critic Carl Wilson dives headlong into this fertile, galvanizing topic in "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste." Its title springs from Dion's most famous album (the one with "Titanic's" "My Heart Will Go On") and lives up to it on multiple levels.

Wilson writes and edits for Canada's national paper the Globe and Mail in Toronto, and his initial revulsion at taking Dion seriously rings deeply because of his nationality. Ostensibly an exploration of the aesthetics and subjectivity of taste, "Let's Talk About Love" also includes a surprising (and surprisingly interesting) amount of Dion's history as an artist and Wilson's squirrelly cultural self-examination.

As Wilson pointed out in a recent essay for Powells.com, his book follows most in Continuum's 33 1/3 series in looking at the larger sociocultural contexts of seminal albums, as opposed to simply unpacking the immediate context in which they were created or consumed. It just so happens that "Love" (176 pages, $10.95) is the first of the Continuum series to consider an album for its overt awfulness instead of its value in the critical canon. And, really, this could be the best book of the series.